Who are your players?

I want to look at what the differences between a campaign game and a con game are. There are a few and I want to examine each one to look at the implications. The first one I want to hit sounds simple – in con games, you don’t know who your players will be.

…we’re back or what about that Kapcon?

Ok, I returned to work after maternity leave and everything that wasn’t work or baby fell over, including this blog.   I’ve slowly clawed my way back into the world and am up and staggering again.

Rule Zero: Don't be a...

I'm going to share the best piece of gaming advice I've ever recieved. The present form originates in Houses of the Blooded, and has been incorporated into a number of ongoing Live-Action Roleplaying (LARP) campaigns locally. It's such a good, solid, simple piece of advice that I've applied it to con games (freeform and tabletop), broader gaming contexts, and life in general.

The rule is: Don't be a dick.*

Simple, solid.

What to do in a (bad) convention freeform

In the bad game survey, one of the most common complaints was insufficient stuff to do in a freeform. Moving from theory to reality, I've come up with a few strategies for players who find themselves in a less than well constructed freeform.

Why are we so special?

There’s a lot of us vs. theming going on at the moment in my world, for a wide variety of “us” and “them”, rather than join in I thought I would walk through an Australian convention and point out the bits we do differently from everyone else.

The World Beyond our Shores

Our stats info paints rather an odd picture of who is reading, and doesn't answer "why?" at all.

So, a question for the Kiwis, Europeans, Americans and others - what have you heard about "Aussie-style" games?

And what do you want to hear?

The poker chip game

One of the things I've been struggling with for a little while now has been for players to strongly engage with the themes of my games. In my most recent game, I tried to invert that – make the themes one of the biggest parts for the players to engage with. To do it, I used poker chips.